The Morning Blend
Welcome
Complete Media Kit
For the Herald/Review
Come celebrate Earth Day, a Mother’s Day for the planet. This grass-roots holiday is a day to reflect upon and encourage care for the Earth, our home. It is also a day to take action by selecting an earth-friendly activity or practice to adopt. Earth Day at the Sierra Vista Farmers Market this Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. will showcase this special spot on the planet. There is an amazing world waiting right outside your doorstep.
Find out about the area’s outdoor recreational activities and opportunities. Spending more time outside in the earth’s wild lands can contribute to well-being in many ways. “No child left inside,” is a slogan for passing on earth appreciation and knowledge to your children.
Environmental challenges appear enormous but if each of us picks one simple or fun thing to do or support, together we can make a difference.
 Shoppers enjoy purchasing healthy meats from three local ranchers and plants from a local grower at the Sierra Vista Farmers Market's Earth Day Celebration last year. This year over forty local farmers and ranchers, bakers, herbalists, native plant growers, soap makers and canners will bring a wide variety of just picked fresh produce, grass-fed meats, ranch eggs, home-style jams, jellies, pickles, baked goods and specialty foods and hand made soaps, lotions, herbal products and natural body care. (Photo courtesy of Valerie McCaffrey) |
On Earth Day local organizations will offer information about all kinds of earth-wise practices. Commute to work on a bicycle. Join a hiking, biking, birding, gardening, star gazing or butterfly group.
Become a volunteer for a friends group. Get some worms to eat your kitchen vegetable scraps and compost your yard waste or call the city to pick it up instead of putting it in the trash. Discover the excitement of collecting rain water or cooking with the sun.
Friends of the Huachucas, Friends of the San Pedro and Friends of Brown Canyon will have displays as well as membership, volunteer and event information.
Friends of Brown Canyon is dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Brown Canyon Ranch, a historic ranch in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains complete with an old adobe house and a pond with a shady picnic area great for bird watching along a picturesque loop trail.
The Forest Service will bring fire-wise and general forest recreation information. There also will be a guest appearance by Smokey the Bear.
Huachuca Audubon will provide lots of local birding information. They will sell $2 reusable shopping bags made from recyclable plastic.
Used once a week for two years, each bag will keep 416 plastic bags out of the landfill and save enough petroleum to drive a car 30 miles. Find out about Southwest Wings Birding Festival to be held in Sierra Vista again this year.
Two members of the Huachuca Astronomy Club will bring large telescopes for observing the sun as well as information about controlling light pollution. Follow your nose to the solar chefs who will use the sun to cook a chicken or roast and bake banana bread.
Recycling
Earth worms will be celebrated this year. Visit the two worm tents to see worms at work, the great soil they can help create and why plants love worm poop. Ask the worm experts your questions. The Worm Man, Richard James, will take orders for worms. Pick up worm composting handouts.
Recycle 20 ounce soda bottles with Worm Woman Judy Goodenough who is spearheading the bottle brigade to help fund a school vegetable garden through TerraCycle, a company that reuses the bottles for their fertilizer.
The city of Sierra Vista will have information about its recycling and composting programs.
Huachuca Mountain Elementary School and Sierra Vista Middle School will launch an ongoing plastic bag and aluminum can collection to fund student programs not covered in shrinking state budgets.
Desert growing
Find out about the University of Arizona’s Master Gardener program providing Cochise County- appropriate horticultural information about gardening, food production, landscaping, native plants and environmental stewardship. Look for the “Ask the Master Gardener” sign where a program graduate will take your questions, ensure they are thoroughly researched and get you a prompt answer.
Sierra Vista Area Garden Club will have free seeds and information about their plant sales and interesting monthly gardening programs.
WaterWise and Desert Oasis will offer information on how to save water at home, how to use gray water on your garden and harvest rain water off your roof.
Entertainment schedule
Gray Hawk Nature Center will provide an assortment of snakes and creepy crawlers for viewing and petting.
The Desert Spirits 4H Club will demonstrate goat milking and bring adorable pygmy goats.
Cochise County Youth Orchestra will play classical, modern and old-fashioned fiddle music starting at 10 a.m. They will be followed at 11 a.m. with Bluegrass music by the Jones Gang, Sierra Vista’s ever more versatile family band. At noon David Kaemmer, master hot swing fiddler will really make his fiddle sing.
Volunteers needed
Volunteers are needed at 7 a.m. to help set up two entertainment tents and several canopies.
This week’s market
More than 30 vendors will sell locally produced foods.
Fiore di Capra “Flower of the Goat” Arizona’s only Grade A Goat Dairy and Creamery located in Pomerene will debut with fresh raw goat’s milk (free samples) and a large variety of “chevre” or goat milk cheeses.
Try a traditional chevre log, hand rolled in a variety of herbs and spices (Plain, Tuscan Herb, Four Pepper and Paprika) or their chevre spreads as a cream cheese substitute.
They also make slightly aged chevre marinated in a blend of herbs and spices (Italian Style: sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts and Italian herbs in olive oil. Spicy; Tepin, Pequin, Habanero and Red Chili peppers with Rosemary and Cilantro in Sunflower oil. Herbal; Juniper berries, black peppercorns, bay, rosemary and sea salt in Grapeseed oil.) Their Queso Blanco is a fresh white cheese with your choice of green olives, chipotle or jalapeno peppers.
Their chevre tortes are popular as an appetizer. Choose from sun dried tomato and pesto or green olive tapenade layered with plain chevre. To finish a meal they offer a great dessert torte of dried fruits and nuts layered with plain chevre.
The Montoya family will return with shallots, lettuce, and fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, sage, and mint).
San Pedro Mesquite Company of Bowie will bring mesquite flour, mesquite cookbooks, mesquite wood cutting boards and picture frames and mesquite power bars.
Natalie McGee who harvests prickly pear fruits off her grandfather’s former ranchlands will be at the market with all her sugar-free Arizona Cactus Ranch products that she has been making for 17 years.
Anyone with questions pertaining to diabetes, high cholesterol and triglycerides, high blood pressure and weight loss, stop by her booth to find out how this miraculous desert fruit can help you lower your numbers without side effects. Her cactus fruit products (prickly pear fruit spread, topping and fruit square) not only are very beneficial health-wise but also taste good.
Jane Wyatt of the San Simon Chile Company will offer jalapeno relish, red and green jalapeno jelly, a mixed hot pepper jelly and roasted green chile all using hot peppers she grows on her farm.
Circle T Emu Ranch will return with emu products including emu oil soft gel caps, pure emu oil, emu oil body care including a sports/muscle rub, bruise cream, lip balm, and emu oil and goat milk soap. Ask them about their very lean, additive-free emu fillet steaks and ground emu meat.
Native Seeds/SEARCH, seed bank for the Southwest deserts, will offer a selection of unusual heritage dried beans, all a delight for the eye and taste buds.
Choose between Christmas Lima Beans (burgundy and white with a nutty, chestnut flavor that retains their color when cooked), Tohono O’odham pink beans, Anasazi (maroon and white mottled), Ojo de Cabra (Eye of the Goat), heirloom bean soup mixes (with 5 varieties of heirloom beans packed with red chile, spices and a recipe), Maicoba beans (lovely shades of yellow, gold and beige tint these yummy Mexican beans) and brown and white tepary beans.
Tepary beans are native to the canyons and arroyos of southern Arizona and native peoples have dryland farmed them for hundreds of years using water from monsoonal rains. They mature quickly and are tolerant of desert heat, drought and alkaline soil, and can be grown with as little as three irrigations. Teparies have a unique nutty taste.
Pick up a handout with recipes.
To spice up your beans take home some Santa Cruz hot chile powder made in Tumacacori or medium hot Chimayo Chile powder to make your own red chile sauce for enchiladas.
Grow something unusual in your garden this year using these desert heirloom seeds.
Drought tolerant seeds will include: Mrs. Burn’s Lemon Basil, Hopi Red Dye Amaranth (six-foot plant with 1- to 2-foot-long scarlet flower used as natural food dye) which produces edible seedlings, seeds for cooked cereal or flour, Tohono O’odham dipper gourd, Tarahumara chia, Texas Hill Country Red Okra, Magdalena Big Cheese winter squash (large, light orange, ribbed fruits with sweet, bright orange flesh), Carrizo (butternut-shaped, tasty, orange fruit), Tohono O’odham Ha (prized for immature fruits and good storing mature fruits with light orange flesh), Pacheco and Tarahumara Pumpkin, Zuni Tomatillo, Punta Banda Tomato (lots of red, meaty fruits despite heat, water stress or poor soil), medium heat “Sinahuisa” serrano chile, Hopi and Tohono O’odham yellow-meated watermelons.
The Cochise County Youth Orchestra will hold a large bake sale with all sorts of goodies.
Garden of Eat’n will bring gourmet lettuce, spinach, greens, radishes, English shelling peas and sugar snap peas and farm eggs.
Additive free meats will include grass-fed lamb, beef, natural pork (nitrite-free hams and bacon, pork chops, smoked ham hocks) as well as Italian, breakfast and chorizo lamb or pork sausage and polish and bratwurst (pork) links.
Grammie’s Garden will have “kitchen window” tomatoes, green peppers and egg plants, herb and vegetable pasta, pinto beans from Bonita, tomatoes from Willcox , certified organic mangoes, watermelons, colored bell peppers, summer squash, and cucumbers.
Max, Alaska retired fisherman, will bring red & king salmon, ling cod, halibut, red king crab and smoked salmon.
Plants
Penney Artio, Gary Foss, Oaks of the Wild West, Angel Rutherford, Yvonne Jingle, Cactus Guy Joe Moran and Tombstone’s Desert Blossom will all be there with different plants or floral creations.
Patty wrote on Jan 18, 2009 10:40 PM: